The Moon's Complexion

by Irene Black

  The following year, Priya graduated from university and was free to marry her Canadian fiancé, Harsha. The wedding was arranged for December.

  As the time for Priya’s wedding approached, Ashok began to look forward with growing anticipation to his visit home. One Friday evening in September, he sat in Dr. Patel’s living room cradling an after dinner cognac. He felt warmer and more at ease than ever in the Patels’ company of late, as though being in their home were satisfying some need in him.

  “Well now, my boy. We will have to start thinking about your future, isn’t it? You have reached the dizzying heights at Queen Anne’s. What is next step to be, do you think? You can’t stay there forever.”

  “Strange. I’ve been mulling that over in my mind also. I think you’re right. It’s time for a change.”

  “Listen—there’s a consultancy going at the John Radcliffe. As soon as I heard about it, I was thinking—that’s made for Ashok. It’s your job, Ashok. It’s sitting there waiting for you.”

  Ashok let the prospect wash over him briefly.

  “You know, Dr. Patel, a few years ago, I would have jumped at this chance. It’s everything I would have wanted. But now...I’m not so sure. When I was in India last time, I realized that sooner or later I would have to return for good. I’m not the same as you, Dr. Patel. I can’t stay here forever. And well...during the last year or so, things have happened to make me even less inclined to get too comfortable here. I feel I’ve repaid England for all it’s given me over the years. Now perhaps it’s time for me to make the break and give something back to India.”

  Dr. Patel smiled.

  “How did I know that would be your answer? You will be a great loss here, but perhaps you can do even more good back home. I will not try to dissuade you.’

  In October, Ashok secured a consultancy at Shanti Sagar Hospital in Bangalore and handed in his resignation at Queen Anne’s. In November, he sold his Richmond flat and moved in with Dr. and Mrs. Patel.

  On the first day of December, Ashok drove down to Hannah’s cottage. The grounds were slippery and rotten with two years’ accumulated autumn and winter debris. Paint was beginning to peel off the once-white exterior walls. Tree branches hung limp and bare. The pile of correspondence on the hall table had stopped growing. People no longer wrote to Hannah, it seemed.

  Ashok slipped and slid across the muddy remains of lawn to the shed. The note that he had posted so long ago was still untouched, if a little moldy. He stood for a moment, looking back at the cottage, as if he were trying to seal into his memory forever this final association with Hannah. He drew from his pocket a folded sheet of paper. Slowly, carefully, he unfolded it and gazed for the last time on the gaudy poster of Ganesh that had hung above his desk in Richmond. Briefly, he touched his fingers to his lips and passed them over the face of the elephant-god. “May good fortune always go with you, my Hannah,” he whispered. He refolded the poster and slipped it through the window-gap into the shed, where it came to rest next to his note. He turned and walked away. The cold wind stung his tear-filled eyes.

  Three weeks later, almost exactly two years after he had stepped off the plane in Delhi, Ashok returned to India.

  Chapter 17

  The island shimmered below the aircraft like a delicate, green mayfly hovering over the sapphire sea. Here Hannah would abandon herself to timelessness. Here she would forget. The first day of 1992 would bring with it a new beginning.

  By the time she reached her half-brother George’s house, Hannah was feverish, bordering on delirium. The wound on her leg had burst open during the flight from Bangalore to Chennai and, despite antibiotics, was septic by the time she boarded the aircraft to Colombo some hours later.

  From the moment that she collapsed on their doorstep, they had welcomed her as one of their own. George’s wife Ranee and the other women of the household were solicitous in their care of her. Slowly, week by week, they nursed her back to health, taking it in turns to sit with her, feed her, mop her brow, read to her. George, the consummate diplomat, asked no questions, made no demands, came and went like a benevolent spirit, smiled and patted her hand. He was simply overwhelmed to meet his sister at last and to be able to welcome her into his world. Lounging around in a batik sarong on his days off, instructing the servants, studying one of his beloved Buddhist commentaries, he was the epitome of a well-heeled local businessman. But although he had never known his father, there was no mistaking him, Hannah thought. He was a toffee-apple clone of the old man. Odd, she reflected, that Dad had so completely broken ties. Was it for Mum’s sake? Surely Mum would have understood? Hannah knew that he had never ceased to love the island; he spoke of it often, but he had never come back to it. Perhaps the pain was too great. A son, who could never be his, never share his life.

  George lived with his wife’s family in the well-to-do Colombo suburb of Wellawatte. They lived in a narrow lane off the Galle Road, leading down to the sea. The house was large, accommodating not only George, his wife, and their three children, but also his wife’s parents and two younger sisters. When George’s first child was born, his parents-in-law converted the top of the house into a large flat and moved into it with the two younger daughters, thus freeing the rest of the house for the new family. The rooms were dark and sparsely furnished. Stone floors, swept by a stunted servant girl, were cool in the fierce heat. But when the electricity cut out and the fans stopped, which happened almost daily, the house became a sauna.

  During that first year on the island, Hannah set all thoughts of work, of writing, of returning to England aside. It was a time of healing and, hand in hand with her lingering sorrow, a joy, hitherto undreamt of.

  At the end of twelve months came the promise of reprieve. Although she had taken the advice of her brother’s doctor to discontinue the antibiotic drugs, Hannah had not developed tuberculosis. Now, the doctor assured her, the danger was to all intents and purposes past. She gave a prayer of thanks to her universal God and laid an offering of frangipani blossom at the foot of the Buddha statue in the nearby temple. It was the turning point. From then on, she took renewed interest in the world around her. She turned her mind to the enigma of the island that she had made her home. She studied the plants, the animals, the architecture, the religious and ethnic diversity that was both its blessing and its curse. And she began to write again.

  Sri Lanka—teardrop of India. Life has been returned to me here. Over the past year I have learnt to live, and to love again, unconditionally. Here I have found greater happiness and peace than I could have imagined during those first, terrible days in this tainted paradise. For paradise it is, a voluptuous island, a lush garden of swaying coconut groves lapped by the Indian ocean; of mountain peaks and savage jungle; of ancient temples and elephants; of gentle people and enigmatic faiths. But this paradise has been violated; for it is also a place of brutal conflict and intolerance; of civil war and repression.

  It is easy to forget the dark secret of this sensuous land. It is easy to be seduced by it, when we idle along the Galle Road to the market where they sell ladies’ fingers as fat and as long as broad-beans; ten different kinds of banana; pineapples so succulent that they seem to have no core; snake gourds and bitter gourds straight out of a sci-fi movie; hard little green amberella fruits for making chutney; paw-paw and guava; mangosteen and mango. It is easy to be lulled into complacency when together we take a three-wheeler (as they call the autorickshaws here) to Mount Lavinia and spend a happy afternoon in the pool overlooking the ocean. It is easy to surrender to the island’s charms, to close your mind to the bombing and the shooting, the roadblocks and the routine handbag searches in the big stores. Oh yes, it is all so easy.

  Sometimes, when George has a day off, he takes me to a forest hermitage. He’s trying to “heal” me by showing me the Buddhist way—the middle way. We drive for hours, first along the coast and then inland, through paddy, coconut and tea. The road turns into a pot-holed dirt track. Virgin forest and the encroachi
ng hills are punctuated by teak and betel nut plantations. We leave the car and climb for an hour through dripping, steamy rain forest, past spring-fed ponds of little jewel-like fish. We wade through leech-infested rivulets, the air thick with the heady scent of verdure. Fiery temple trees and darting butterflies and dragonflies form luminescent highlights on the green canvas. We trudge upward through tangled undergrowth until we reach the monastery. Near the top there are many small grottos for quiet contemplation dotted among the trees. The hermitage itself is a place of tranquil beauty, timeless. Here George sometimes comes to spend an hour, or a day or longer searching for serenity, for the middle way.

  Maybe one day, she thought, she would turn these little sketches into a book, a book not centered, as all her other books had been, around some worthy cause, some social injustice, but around herself. She would write about the island in terms of what it meant to her, all that had happened to her here, all that she had learned from its people. She would write about its dark side, too, and the resulting dichotomies that her mind found hard to reconcile. Perhaps by writing she would complete the healing process.

  The conflict between the Tamils and the Singhalese was ongoing. The undercurrent of risk was ever present. However, the trouble now seemed to be mainly confined to the north and the east of the country, where the Tamil rebels were trying to establish a separate, independent state. There had been relatively few disturbances in Colombo while Hannah had been in the country. She had no qualms about her safety. She’d felt less secure in Belfast.

  During the 1993 May Day parade, the nation’s President was assassinated by a suicide bomber, an alleged member of the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, commonly known as the Tamil Tigers. Still Hannah dug in her heels.

  “Don’t be too protective of me,” she said to George when he warned her against traveling into the city center for a while. “You forget, this kind of thing is my bread and butter.”

  “Don’t underestimate the danger,” George said, frowning. “Until now, it has been relatively calm in the city. But, as you see, trouble is never far beneath the surface. And news is censored, you know. We don’t hear what the government doesn’t want us to hear. Partly to stop feelings getting out of hand and more trouble escalating. What we don’t want is a repetition of eighty-nine.”

  “What happened in eighty-nine?”

  “A reign of terror because of military and political bungling. Many innocent people got caught up in it. Families wiped out, some fifty people getting killed daily. They used to burn the bodies with tires on the roads leading to Colombo. They even closed the universities and schools for four months. You regularly saw corpses floating in lakes and rivers. Not a pleasant time to be here.”

  “But you stayed, nonetheless.”

  “It’s my home, Hannah.”

  “Yes. I do understand, George.” And now it’s my home, too, she told herself.

  But her earlier comment to George had triggered a certain unrest in her. It’s my bread and butter—why did I say that? It was my bread and butter, certainly. But now? Have I opted out? Have I perhaps unwittingly slipped into the middle way?

  Slowly, she began to contemplate, to reassess her life...

  Middle way? Yes, for you maybe, George, but I think not for me. Avoiding the destructive forces of extreme passions, of love and hate, of sorrow and joy. I could have saved myself a lot of heartache in the past if I had been a follower of the middle way. But I wouldn’t have missed a moment of those highs in order to avoid the lows. Isn’t that what’s in danger of happening to me now, though? Aren’t I steering a middle course, choosing the blindness of serenity by lingering so pleasantly here? Eyes closed to the violence around me, eyes closed also to the need to purge myself of the shadow of Mark Salers? And the shadow of Maighréad? And the shadow of...? I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll never come to terms with what’s happened until I finish what I began...

  Almost a year previously, Duncan Forbes had sent her a copy of Salers’ book.

  Hannah hadn’t read it. It lay in the back of her wardrobe, unopened. Duncan’s world had seemed so far away. What did Salers matter? What did anything matter, except the here and now? The ghost of those dark days had dissipated in the light of the miracle that had taken place here.

  Now, finally, as the last of the southwest monsoon rains darkened the summer sky, Hannah opened the book.

  By October, she had made her decision to return to England in the New Year.

  Once she had made the booking, her final days on the island were hard to bear. It was one thing to talk about going. It was quite another to face the reality of it. To face the reality of the final break with the sub-continent and its memories, so bitter and so sweet.

  For almost two years, Hannah had appeared impassive. No inkling of a broken love affair had leaked into the image that she outwardly portrayed. Only at night, solitary, private under the mosquito net, did she allow silent tears to flow. Tears for her lost love, for the face that forced itself, unwished for, into her dreams. Tears for her incomprehension. Ashok betrothed. It was all so clear now. His reluctance to talk about his home or to take her to meet his family. It all made sense.

  And suddenly it was January, and the day of departure was upon her. In the morning, Hannah walked along the beach for one last time, committing to memory the sound of the breakers, the distant tower blocks of Colombo to the north, the rocky outcrop of Mount Lavinia to the south. A train chugged past on the beachside railway line. A couple of foolhardy men, clinging like caterpillars to the exterior of the train, released one hand to wave in greeting. Hannah smiled and waved back.

  Two old coconut palms on the shore seemed to signal to her, old friends bidding farewell. Hannah would never again see the sun go down behind the palm fronds.

  As she walked along the beach, listening to the sea and watching the child at the water’s edge as she once did in Mamallapuram, she found that she could think of that happy time without bitterness. It was as if an earlier Ashok walked beside her, unsullied, incorrupt.

  “Siddarth,” she said to the little boy, “time to go. Our aeroplane is waiting.”

  She held out her arms, and the child toddled into them: a plump, charming child with pouting lips and deep, dark, laughing eyes—eyes with which, unknowingly, he struck his mother a hammer blow each time they met her own.

  Chapter 18

  Of all the things that Ashok missed about England, his daily Guardian stood near the top of the list. Thus he had decided, after his first Guardian-deprived month in Bangalore, to order the Weekly Guardian for himself, as well as for his sister, who had been carted off by her new husband to what Ashok was convinced would be a life of cultural deprivation in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

  Early one October Sunday morning, nearly two years after his return to India, during a precious few moments’ relaxation in the garden hammock before he set off to the hospital, Ashok was flicking through his flimsy fix of weekly world events when a book review caught his eye.

  Seeker after Truth?

  As a Matter of Fact: Hannah Petersen (Hamilton and Forbes).

  Whatever one thinks of Hannah Petersen’s frequently-demonstrated inability to remove herself to a safe, aesthetic distance from her subject matter, one has to admire the chutzpah of the woman who does not take a beating lying down, even if the beating so defeats its purpose that it amounts to more of a pat on the back.

  Whether Petersen’s latest book, As a Matter of Fact, is seen as an attempt to justify the actions documented in her book A Small Life (published by Hamilton and Forbes, 1986), which was famously discredited by its antihero in his posthumously published and grotesquely farcical booklet In the Name of Love, or whether it is a genuine attempt to seek out the truth is a matter of conjecture. Nevertheless, it makes compelling reading.

  When Petersen wrote A Small Life, there was no doubt in her mind that journalist and broadcaster Mark Salers was solely responsible for the terrible physical abuse of his young wife, Maighréad. A
Small Life told the story of Maighréad’s miserable existence and eventual suicide, and of Mark Salers’ arrest and conviction in April 1985 for grievous bodily harm. Salers was subsequently given a fifteen-year prison sentence, of which he served five years.

  Upon his release, Salers began a relentless persecution of Hannah Petersen, which took the form of persistent stalking. Salers’ obsession was such that, when Petersen left England for India a year later, Salers followed her there and continued to pursue her. In India, Salers finally succumbed to the tuberculosis with which he had been infected during his time in prison, but before he died, he made certain statements to Petersen, in which, among other things, he asserted that he had never abused Maighréad Salers. His book, which he completed shortly before his death, was a vulgar and abhorrent attempt to expose his conviction as a miscarriage of justice.

  Hannah Petersen spent the next two years in Sri Lanka then returned to England in order to begin research on A Matter of Fact. One would question the wisdom of this venture. Surely Salers’ ravings would have been better off ignored.

  The first part of the somewhat curiously set out document is devoted to the events that took place between the time of Salers’ release and Petersen’s departure for India. The eloquent style of her writing takes the reader graphically into the nightmare world of her persecution at Salers’ hands, filled with shadows and terrifying events that were at the time inexplicable and brushed aside by a cynical police force. Matters were further complicated by the unrelated arrest of a private investigator recruited to spy on Petersen by American psychiatrist Elliot Bannerman, whose fraudulent activities were exposed in Petersen’s book Fair Game. The account ends with Salers’ gruesome demise in India, which he compelled the unfortunate Petersen to witness.